Thomas J. West Music

The unique performing arts school I work for is looking for a new home. It's a happy problem to have - we're bursting at the seams with students at our current location in West Chester, PA.

The school is an offering of the Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School, a K-12 cyber school. Students take their coursework from home via web-based lessons. For those within a two-hour drive of West Chester, students may audition to enroll in classes at the CPFA beginning in 5th grade. The students spend two days a week for an entire school day taking classes in music, art, drama, and dance.

The middle school students (grades 5-8) also experience a course called integrated arts, where an area of focus is explored by all four disciplines. This year, our theme is "The Italian Renaissance" and to finish the year, the middle school students will be staging the masquerade ball scene from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Students will be assigned roles as actors, dancers, musicians, or will help the art department make masques for the dancers and actors to wear during the performance.

The high school students do exceptionally brilliant work. The art shows each semester are amazing, the theater department puts on five productions a year (two middle school and three high school, including an original murder mystery script written by center director Mark Allen), and the music graduates are auditioning for prestigeous music schools such as Berklee, North Texas, the Frost School of Music (U. Miami), etc.

If anyone among my readership knows of an available building in the Greater Philadelphia area that can fit the following needs, please let me know. The building can be in a corporate park, a former school building, a former church building, a former anything. We're looking for:

• An auditorium or 1000 sq. ft.  large room with 20 foot + ceilings for theater, music, and dance performances
• Two large rooms, preferably with dance floors, mirrors, and bars already installed
• Two large rooms for instrumental and choral music rehearsal space and storage
• One kitchen/cafeteria/dining area
• Rest rooms, preferably with a locker/changing area
• Classroom-sized rooms for 2D Art, 3D Art, dark room photo, digital artlab, music keyboard lab, general music/guitar, acting, and tech theater
• 5-10 office rooms
• 1-5 practice rooms
• Storage for props, costumes, bric brac, etc.
• LAN ethernet ready

Any assistance or leads would be greatly appreciated. A big welcome to the new readership that has joined my newsletter list over the past two months.

This article (c) 2010 by Thomas J. West. Please contact the author before reprinting on or offline.

If you started learning how to play a band or orchestra instrument in an American elementary school, you probably had the experience of having to fill out a practice chart. You know the one - you have a grid with 7 blocks for each day of the week and a spot for your parents to sign. You are supposed to write down how many minutes you practiced each day (30, right?) and then have your parents sign it for submission to your music teacher each lesson.

What did this activity teach me as a fourth grader? Traditional charts accomplish little except teaching students how to fudge numbers and forge their parents' signature. Even honest little kids like me were forced to fake the signature when my parents lapsed and forgot to sign the chart. Practicing at home is essential, especially in the early stages of skill development on an instrumnet. Most American public school elementary music programs have little room in the schedule for instructional time, so home practice is essential.

Practice is Essential, But Not Common

After that formative stage of skill building in elementary school, the average instrumental student resorts to as little, if any, home practicing. Depending on the demands of the school's music program and the community that supports it, students home practice can range from doing none to having private teachers and practicing several hours a week. Unless your child is part of a program like Carmel Indiana, where the top orchestra (out of five!) is by audition and every single student studies privately, the majority of school programs in the country are in the former category. Even in the one high-achieving band program I've worked for, students as a general rule did very little practicing at home.

How is it that it is common practice to not practice? Quite simply, because most music programs are thought of as "the extra stuff" or "the fun stuff" rather than as an important part of a child's education. For students with high aptitude, they don't need to practice to play the level of literature their program is working on. For students with average musical aptitude, the amount of rehearsal during the school day is sufficient to get them to become proficient by concert time. And for those with low musical aptitude, they often just hang out in the bottom of their section, play the "easy parts", and lay out of the more difficult technical passages. In most programs, students are graded on participation, which is simply being present for all classes, out of school rehearsals, and performances. There are additional portions of their grade for playing tests or seating challenges, but most teachers design their grades so that a person can just show up, be a good participant, and they'll get a C or better.

So, how does a music teacher motivate their students to practice? How do we push the envelope of what the band or orchestra is capable of? Let me share the evolution I have been experimenting with so far.

Step One: The Practice Journal

I teach at a rather unique School for the Performing and Fine Arts. At the school, we have the challenges and benefits of small class sizes. I average about six students per class, and I combine classes to form a 20-30 person chamber orchestra for concerts. The expectation is that they every student is going to maximize their aptitude and become proficient on their chosen instrument. By proficient, I mean capable of playing major and minor scales and arpeggios, play the full range of their instrument, play expressively with proper tone, and be able to sight read and improvise. Depending upon their aptitude, lower achieving students may not be capable of all of these things, but they are capable of some of them. For the average student, all of these are possible with proper practicing and study.

I select repetoire that pushes the envelope in one way or another for every concert they are working towards.Even the advanced players have work to do, because if the ensemble literature doesn't challenge them, they have solo and duet literature assigned to them that will. Because of this, every student is expected to play their instrument five times a week (twice at school, three times at home) and are required to fill out and submit a practice journal entry once a week. During the 2008-09 school year, the practice journal was designed to teach the students how to create an effective practice session.

There were three main sections they had to fill out - one for warm-up and scales, one for repertoire, and one for what I called "fun time", which could consist of sight reading, improvising, or playing a tune out of their method book they already mastered and enjoyed playing.

Initially, as with any change, they were slow to respond. I had to chase them down often. After a while, they got used to just jotting down some specifics like approximate time spent on each phase and the specifics of what they worked on. There was also a section of the page to write comments on each thing. The form enabled me to see what they were actually working on, how long they spent on it, and even give them feedback on the comments they made about their practicing.

Step Two: From Journal to Self-Analysis Rubric

At the end of the first year, it became apparent that I was not going to need to continue to reinforce the concepts the students learned about how to practice effectively. I needed to give them a way to evaluate their own performance as part of the journal. Stealing a page from my work as a marching band adjudicator, I created the following:

The newly designed practice journal page did not have a slot for estimated time. The focus was on student self-analysis, so the amount of time it took to get the results they wanted varied. The new journal page had a section for scales and arpeggios, a section for method or etude book assignments, and a section for repertoire. Each section had a blank for the student to score themselves using the rubric (a final total for the week on that item), how many octaves (for scales and arpeggios), and a "problem spots" blank for them to identify problematic techniques or measure numbers.

It took a while for student to figure out how to use a rubric (many of them just wrote a 1, 2, 3, or 4 for the levels rather than using the 100 point scale), but here at the half-way mark of the 2009-2010 school year, they are becoming quite good at using the rubric to evaluate their progress towards performance readiness.

No System is Perfect

Now I know what you're thinking: "They can still lie to you." Of course, and I have no way of holding them accountable for the accuracy or veracity of the data they submit. However, it is fairly apparent from their in-class performance (which they also receive weekly points for) and the lack of progress over time. In most cases, the students are very astute about their own performance and rate themselves quite accurately (or even too harshly) using the rubric.

The evolution of this concept for next year will include some method for them to track their ratings from week to week and see if they are consistently rating themselves and approving each item they practice.

If any music teachers out there use a practice record system similar to this or any system at all, please post a comment or send me your thoughts.

This article (c) 2009 Thomas J. West. If you wish to reprint this article on another website or offline, please contact the copyright holder before using.

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Here are a few new musically-related folks that I've had some great chats with on Twitter recently:

MeLikeGoodMusic @MeLikeGoodMusic has a really cool website where he features a song by a different underrated artist daily. He spans multiple genres and styles from hip hop to broadway. We've had some cool chats about show tunes in particular.

Gae Phillips @gphilli is a 6-12th grade band director from Columbus, Kansas. He is one of the growing number of music educators who are joining the cyber age. His band website is a great resource for his students and even instructs them on how to use Twitter to learn new things. We've been swapping band director war stories!

Alex Choral @AlexChoral is the official Twitter home of the Alexandria Choral Society of Alexandria, Virginia. They are a community adult choral organization and just had their auditions for the new season recently. I've had fun following their process and giving them some tips on how to get some sound clips on Twitter using TweetMic.

It was only a matter of time before I crossed paths with Andy Zweibl @Zweibz7 online somewhere. Andy is a Music Education major at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. In addition to his own website, Andy also blogs on MusicEdMajor.net and somehow manages to find time to manage the UM Band website, be president of his school's CMENC chapter, and meet all the requirements of a Music Ed major (which are hefty, folks). Andy is one of those aspiring music educators who has already embraced social media as a way to network, learn, and discuss music teaching with other music educators everywhere. I'm looking forward to following and sharing regularly.

More music tweeps next week. Thanks to these folks for chatting with me and sharing their experiences.

This article (c) 2009 Thomas J. West. Please contact the author before publishing on or offline.

Just this past week, my cousin emailed me. Her daughter is going into third grade and is interested in starting to play the violin. My cousin played flute back in grade school but quit before high school and doesn't remember much of her formative music instruction. She asked me for advice on how to find the right instrument for her daughter.

I found it rather unfortunate that the strings teacher at her daughter's school did not supply them with more information on making this important decision. The teacher measured her arm and sent home a sheet indicating that she should get a 1/2 sized violin and gave them a list of music retailers in their area. My cousin asked me some very intelligent and critical questions. I realized as I was answering them that this would be a great bit of information to share with my readers.

Questions and Answers about a Child's First Musical Instrument

Here are the questions my cousin asked me and my responses:

I guess I'm supposed to rent the instrument, right?

Nearly every beginning instrumental student rents an instrument rather than buying for a few reasons:

1. Leasing or buying an instrument outright can be an expensive investment.
2. Young musicians often play for a year (or less) and decide that it's not for them.
3. Beginner level instruments are more affordable, but are not designed to meet the needs of their school career.
4. String students will outgrow the instrument they start on. Most violin and viola players start on a 1/4 or 1/2 sized instrument and move up to a longer instrument by 5th, 6th, or 7th grade.
   

Is one brand of instrument better than another?

When it comes to beginner instruments, any well-established musical instrument company is going to have a product that will meet the needs of beginners. The truth is that the quality of the instrument is not nearly as important at the beginner stage of development because the beginner has not developed enough control for the equipment to make a difference. When a student reaches the intermediate level of development, which usually occurs in middle school or even into high school, the quality of the instrument and accessories becomes much more critical.

Should I just call the music store and tell them what instrument I need?

Most any music retailer has well-trained sales staff who are used to parents calling in and having little to no knowledge about musical instruments. They will have no trouble giving you a rundown of the various brands they have to rent and the price ranges they fall in. Many retailers give you a two or three tier pricing schedule (economy, mid-line, and deluxe). Going with something in the middle of the price range is usually the most popular choice and what I recommend to most parents.

Other Considerations When Acquiring the First Instrument

I also made the following suggestions to my cousin as she called the music stores on her list:

• Do some price shopping. Prices quoted from music retailers can vary widely. Often, music stores in the same geographic area have comparable prices, but that is not always the case. Most music retailers will do price matching if you bring them a low price from a national retailer like The Woodwind and Brasswind. Get a price off their website and take it with you when you go to rent.
• Work with your music teacher. Most local music stores have a "road rep" that travels from school to school and district to district to give band and orchestra directors immediate delivery and order-taking services. They have built a working relationship with the schools in their area and usually offer music teachers a discount. As a parent, you will not be eligible for the same discounts as an educator, but if you work through your school music teacher, you may be able to get your child's instrument picked up and returned to the school when repairs are necessary. The same often goes for instrument supplies such as reeds, valve oil, and strings.
  
• Consider a rent-to-own program. Some music stores will offer you a portion of your monthly payment towards the purchase of a new instrument. This is a great way to invest for a step-up intermediate or professional model instrument if you have a child who shows a lot of aptitude and interest in playing their instrument. A program such as this is how my father was able to afford my first Buffet clarinet when I was a sophomore in high school. Think of it as a "musical instrument 401K plan".
• Take the damage waiver. If your music retailer offers you a damage waiver, I highly recommend you take it. there is a very simple reason why: kids tend to damage instruments. Even if your child is responsible, their classmates may not be. Any band director can tell you stories about how many woodwind key repairs they've done or how many stuck brass mouthpieces or valve keys they've unstuck. Any strings teacher can tell you stories about snapped strings, broken bows, and cracked bodies.

Partnership for Success

Above all, parents should work with music teachers for the mutual success of the student on any issues surrounding instrumental music study. It saddens me that some music teachers will simply give their beginners a list of music stores and say "go rent one." Parents should not be afraid to speak up if there is technical information they don't possess when it comes to music equipment, lessons, practicing, or any other related issues. That is, of course, unless your school's instrumental music teacher is scary, and not just for the kids!

This article (c) 2009 Thomas J. West. Please contact the author before publishing on or offline elsewhere

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So now that I am back to school, time is limited. I thought I'd put together a quick list on Follow Friday of people I've met on Twitter. The criteria I used for who I'm highlighting here are simple.

1. They are people who have engaged me in actual real discussion on Twitter rather than just spamming links or twittering incessantly about their business opportunity.
2. They are people who tend to tweet about music-related topics, but are not necessarily professional musicians or music teachers.
3. They also make the cut if they have something to offer about Twitter or Internet Marketing, as most businesses are moving to this model.

So here's this week's list. More to come in the future:

Bernie Brice @trumpette1 is, according to her bio, "A trumpet-playing single mother!". She lives in Kent, UK and according to her website is part of a trumpet-playing duo that plays all kinds of events. We've had some nice chats about music, our kids, and daily "life stuff". Now that I've looked at her website, I guess I'm going to have to start following @trumpette2 now too!

Mike @woodwindtech is a middle school band director from New Jersey who, in addition to his own blog, writes reviews of new apps for the Iphone for AppVee. Mike and I have chatted about band director stuff and have enjoyed retweeting eachother's messages as well.

Lewis Partridge @NinjaDrummist is a skilled set player from Lutton, UK who plays professionally and teaches professionally as well. His website has lots of great free drumset lesson videos and more. He really digs the info on my website and I have agreed to make his drumset videos available on my video page. Look for them soon.

Laura Lowe @lylowe is an "Independent piano teacher. Freelance organist and pianist. Golf widow. Ballet mom." from Evans, Georgia who shares a lot of great experiences on her blog. She and I have chatted about the use/uselessness of practice logs, individual student techniques, and more.

Josee Deschenes @dimeaglass is a manager/singer/songwriter/guitar player/violap player based in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition to managing bands at Dime-a-glass Entertainment, she plays in the band Trevor Finlay. We've swapped some stories, and last Follow Friday, she listed me as someone who's tweets are "fun and interesting," so she gets the props this week!

It's All About Relationships

Marketing online is all about building relationships with people. I've enjoyed chatting with these and other folks in recent weeks. Please pay them a visit, and if you have interesting music-related tweets of your own, be sure to follow me and say hi.

This article (c) 2009 Thomas J. West. Please contact the author before publishing on or offline elsewhere

If you found this article to be helpful, please donate.

I joined Twitter on July 25th after much resistance to the idea. I was first introduced to it by my some good friends who are computer programmers. They've been on board with Twitter since nearly the beginning, when it was mainly for cubicle monkeys who are on the computer all day as part of their job. When they introduced it to me originally about two years ago, my initial reaction was, "What a time sink! That seems pretty pointless. Who wants up to the minute updates on what I'm having for lunch?"

Since then, Twitter has exploded and now that I'm on board, it's easy to see why.

Hyper Social Marketing

Twitter enables anyone who has anything that they want to bring attention to online to build a targeted list of followers who are interested in what they want to bring attention to. The 140 character limit makes you choose your words carefully, which means that there's less static to read. Unlike Facebook, where you have to have mutual friends, Twitter allows you to follow someone else without following you back, which means you can build a list of followers just like an email subscribers list.

With the ease at which you can insert web links and share links with anyone, and the amazing built-in, minute-by-minute search engine capability, it takes practically no time at all to find your niche market and begin sending them information they are interested in.

The Twitter Learning Curve

Like everything else in Internet marketing, it takes some time to find out how Twitter works, what tools already exist to help you, and how Twitter users function. Just spending these first few weeks on Twitter has taught me a lot. Here's just some of what I've learned in the past month:

1. People can search for any keyword, but using hashtags is a powerful way to get you attention (both welcome and unwelcome) very quickly.
2. There are lots of ways of getting hundreds of followers with zero effort, but few of those methods give you true "targeted" list, no matter what they claim. The best way I've found to get a targeted list is to simply search for a keyword related to your niche and start following people. Simple, effective, and high quality.
3. Every Twitter user has an "at" name. Mine is @thomasjwest. When you use their @name in a tweet, the person who is mentioned can track it and respond to you. All @names are also clickable, so it's another way for people to get to your profile page.
4. This was confusing at first: Originally, Twitter called its messages updates, but as Twitter's popularity expanded, the favored term is now tweets. There are still places where you see the word "updates" being used.
5. When you want to share something another person said or a link that they posted, you do a retweet. Retweeting is a great way of getting people's attention. There is proper etiquette to do so! First, you type "retweet" or "RT" followed by the person's @name, then their message or link. Because of the 140 character limit, it is acceptable to alter the original message to make it fit. Retweeting gets attention for the person you retweeted for, and often they will return the favor.
6. A person with 1,000 or more followers is called a whale. Bigger does not equal better, however.
7. Spammers exist on Twitter, too. When you get a follower who follows hundreds of people but has a very small following, and they have 5-10 tweets that are either links or nonsense, you've most likely got yourself a spammer. Some spammers open hundreds of Twitter accounts and use an automated third-party application to build huge follow lists to spam people. Twitter has strict guidelines about this practice and shut down spammers constantly.
   
8. Celebrity Twitterers register with Twitter and have a "verified account" so that you know it's really them and not someone pretending to be Ashton Kutcher.
9. Direct Messages, or DM's are private 140 character emails within Twitter between you and one other person. A lot of people will use it as a welcome message to new followers, or when they want to say something without the rest of their followers seeing it. It also is a popular way to throw a spam link at someone.
   
10. There are lots of great tools out there to use with Twitter. So far, I'm using TweetDeck, TweetLater, Twitter Analyzer, Twitter Grader, Twitter Karma, Screenr, and FileSocial. I haven't used them yet, but Twitpic and Tweetmic are probably going to find their way into my arsenal as well. All of these tools have a free version with a paid version with added features.

My Results After One Month of Using Twitter

Once I began really expanding my follower list, I broke the one-day record for visits to my website. I also am consistently getting a higher quality of visitor to my website. Before Twitter, I had about a 75% bounce rate (visitors to the site who remained on the site for less than 10 seconds).  I have had several days the past week where my bounce rate had dropped to 45%.

More importantly, I made contact with some amazing people. @winkieflash inquired about my live online webcam music lessons and tried a free lesson with me (she's a flute player from The Netherlands!). I was also contacted by @MartinDeBourge with an offer to write a review for the Sing Clear vocal coaching product. I am enjoying working my way through the CDs and will write the reiview soon.

As I continue to refine my approach to Twitter, this trend can only increase.

My Golden Rules for Marketing with Twitter

Based on my year as an MLM business owner and my year of promoting this website, here are my guidelines for promoting anything using Twitter:

1. Anything that free takes a lot of time to build. On the internet, if it's free to use, you are leveraging your time in exchange for spending the money. Don't expect miracles, even in a week or a month, no matter what "lead generating system" someone tries to sell you on.
   
2. It's all about building relationships. Find people in your niche and then share. People who like what you have to offer will naturally share it with other people on their list who have the same interests.
3. Offer your followers value. Make what you tweet about something that is worth your followers' time and something that will interest them. They will be more likely to retweet it. If you have a lot to offer, tweeting great stuff every fifteen minutes will still turn people off (learned that one the hard way).
4. Take the time to find high quality followers. Some people swear by going to a Twitter directory such as WeFollow, selecting a keyword, choosing one of the top Twitter people on that keyword, and following their top 20 followers. This doesn't guarantee you good followers for a few reasons: the top 20 are the most recent followers, not the followers with the largest following. For broad keywords like "music", the chances of those followers being interested in your niche is low. Nothing beats using the search engine to find people talking about your niche right now. That way, you know they are active Twitter users and are more likely to follow back and retweet your content.
5. Use hashtags. Hashtags allow new people to find things they're interested in and follow you.
6. Use quotes. People love to retweet quotes. Find some quotes about your niche and tweet them. Be sure to follow @SteveRamirez and @twuotes who retweet quotes that use the #quote or #quotes hastags.
7. Have a good profile page. Twitter gives you a very simple profile page that is the only way for people to find out who you are.Make sure your bio is interesting and full of keywords. It amazes me how many people don't have a website listed either. Twitter allows youto upload a customized wallpaper. Pro Twitter users have wallpaper with pictures of themselves and additional ways to contact them. See my profile page for an example.

8. Follow successful social marketing people. You are known by and learn from the company you keep. I suggest people like @nhangen, @tomduong, @davidrisley, @problogger, and @craighcollins

What Works For You?

So, I'd consider my first month on Twitter to be a success. Twitter is definitely worth my time to continue to work with as another way to promote my work. Until the day that I am further out of debt and able to actually sink some money into promotion, I continue to have to rely on social marketing and relationship building as the main tools at my disposal.

If you are using Twitter to promote a website, product, or service and have other tips and tricks to share, please leave a comment, @reply me on Twitter, or send me a message.

The modern metronome is an indispensable practice tool for musicians of any level of experience. Digital metronomes are readily available from any music retailer, as an app for your iPhone, or other online metronome websites.

Most student musicians and even some more experienced musicians do not realize how inconsistent humans are in terms of their perception of time. Our perception of time changes from moment to moment based on our emotional state. Music played at louder dynamics tends to rush, softer music tends to drag. Even a difference in age of the performers tends to produce differences in perceptions of "how fast time passes."

Benefits of Playing with a Metronome

Most student musicians have an unpleasant experience when they first have a metronome forced on them by a teacher. Suddenly, music that the student thought they played well becomes clumsy and hesitant. This is because as they practiced before, they fluctuated in tempo based on their ability to correctly perform each passage. Parts that were "easy" to their perception tended to rush, while passages that were "hard" to them tended to drag. By playing with a metronome, the student is forced to perform at a consistent tempo, which will immediately highlight the passages in the music that they can not perform technically.

Students are reluctant to use a metronome because it "is frustrating" or "makes everything harder". This perception is due to the fact that they can "play it better" when they are allowed to make their own fluctuations in tempo than they can when they are required to maintain pulse. Once students work with a metronome for some time, under the guidance of a teacher, they begin to understand how valuable it can be. Here are some tips for incorporating metronome work into the practice of a student who does not use one.

Ten Tips For Incorporating Metronome Work Into A Practice Routine

1. Explain how metronomes measure tempo in "beats per minute." Link those tempo ranges to musical terms they find in their music, such as Adagio and Allegro.
2. Have a student play a line of music they have already mastered along with the metronome set to various tempi. Have them focus their attention on aligning their performance with the metronome's pulse.
3. Teach students how to use a metronome at slower tempi - either subdividing the metronome's pulse mentally, or setting the metronome to the tempo of the subdivision.
4. Teach students how to incorporate the metronome into their practice, which occurs after the initial note learning is accomplished. The metronome becomes useful once they can basically play through a line of fingerings.
5. Teach students how to use the metronome to identify techincal problem spots in the music and isolate them.
6. Give students metronome goals to shoot for - start with a tempo they can achieve comfortably and increase it throughout the period of concert preparation.
7. Use the metronome to test students' ability to internalize pulse. Give them a tempo from the metronome, have them count silently in their mind, turn off the metronome as they continue to count internally, have them show their pulse visually with conducting or verbally with counting. Check their results against the metronome.
8. Have student improvise duple and triple rhythms while a metronome is playing.
9. Teach students how to find 60 and 120 beats per minute without the use of a metronome.
10. Have a "speed contest" between students using a metronome. Award a prize to the student who can play a difficult passage the fastest with the greatest accuracy.

One last thought on metronome use: It is possible to overuse the metronome, especially with ensembles. Performers should use the metronome to help develop their own internal or ensemble sense of pulse. It can just as easily become a crutch as having the music teacher clap and count along.

This article (c) 2009 Thomas J. West. If you wish to reprint this article on another website or offline, please contact the copyright holder before using.

 
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This quite simply is the result of an incredible natural abilitycoupled with a rich body of knowledge in all styles and forms of music.Superb!

Human perception is a fascinating thing. We do not sense what is actually "out there", we sense what we think is there based on our previous knowledge and beliefs. Two observers can see the same object and get two completely different experiences from that observation. For example, if I look at a famous painting, such as a Monet, I can admire it for its interesting use of color, blending, and proportion. I could then go and study the life of Monet, find out when he painted the work I had viewed, find out what his inpiration was for it, how the events in his life at the time shaped his vision, and how potential patrons may have influenced the painting. I could then return and view the painting again, but the experience would be quite different because of my increased knowledge of the work.

Music is in the Ear of the Beholder

There is perhaps no greater place where this difference of perception is so easily demonstrated than in people's individual tastes in music. The more knowledgeable an individual is about music, the more likely they are to enjoy wider varieties of music and be able to understand more subtle layers of its construction. My wife and I have had several debates on the value of a piece of music. I often find pieces to be technically flawless and subtely expressive in its phrasing, and her reaction is that the same piece is fall-off-your-chair boring.

When it comes to music performance, whether as a soloist or as part of an ensemble, what you perceive is only a small part of what is actually going on. At any given moment during a rehearsal or performance, assuming you are focused on the performance and not allowing the mind to wander, your conscious focus is only on one single aspect of the music at a time. In one instance, you are concerned with your individual pitch matching the others. In the next moment, you are listening for vertical alignment in timing. In any given moment, there are scores of variables to assess and adjust.

What happens is, while you are focused on the multiple aspects of the performance, your conscious awareness is not noticing the ones you take your focus away from, along with many other stimuli that may be bombarding you at the moment. Add the ominous internal voice of  "performance anxiety" to the mix, and the result is simply that there's too much for you to consciously perceive all at the same time.

Most musical ensembles that operate at a high level of excellence receive coaching of some kind from at least one pair of eyes and ears outside of the ensemble. In the case of many school bands and orchestras, this consists of the director running out into the middle of the house during the dress rehearsal in order to assess group balance. In the world of marching band and drum corps, there are instructors and judges both on the field and in the press box to work on all aspects of a group's performance. In the world of competitive barbershop quartet singing, top competitive quartets spend hours with coaches in order to achieve a 100% blended sound.

How Recording Your Performance Can Be Enlightening and Discouraging

Most of us have probably had the experience of hearing our own voice on a recording (is that really what I sound like?) or seen ourselves on a video (my mirror image doesn't look quite like that guy). Recordings capture things exactly as they are - without the filter of our own personality, judgments, and perceptual limitations. The recorder captures what is actually there - nothing is covered over. This can be very enlightening, because you will hear things on the recording that you will never hear live. Recording can also be very frustrating, because it picks up every tiny flaw indiscriminently. I always tell my students and fellow performers that "the recording is unforgiving" because we as performers can't possibly hear and perceive everything that is happening. But, the good news is that the audience can't perceive it all either.

Ever have a great live performance and then go back and watch it on video? It can be a big letdown. Your memory of how it went live doesn't stack up to what the cameras recorded. This is the reason why hearing an unedited live recording of a phenominal musician or ensemble that is still a study in musical mastery is even more impressive. For the rest of us that do not have the time, resources, and ability to perform live at that level, making a recording has to be done with the right attitude. Recording your performance should be about detecting flaws and not about boosting or deflating your sense-of-self.

Some Tips For Recording Your Practice Sessions

If you're not tech savvy, the good old hand-held tape recorder works just fine for detecting flaws. If you want to have a clean digital recording without spending an armload of cash, I recommend a simple digital voice recorder like this one. The microphone is uni-directional, which means you'll have to point your instrument at it or hold it in front of your mouth when singing in order to get a good recording, but if all you're looking for is feedback to work with, it does the job.

If you have a Mac or an iPhone, you can easily record and playback your sounds using the built-in equipment and software that comes with your computer.

If you're a PC person, or even if you want a better quality recording on a Mac, I suggest getting a simple stereo lapel mic like this one. The advantage of this is that you can clip the mic to your shirt collar, on the end of a brass bell, behind the bridge of a violin, etc. in order to get a full sound when making a recording. For recording solo practice work, the up-close mic work really enables you to hear well but also gives you a bit of sound from the room as well.

For recording sound on a PC, I highly recommend Audacity. The freeware version of Audacity gives you many of the features and abilities of professional level programs such as Cakewalk SONAR without having to spend a dime! I actually use a digital CD recorder, two omni-directional mics, and Audacity to make recordings of my student ensembles and concerts. There's a bit of a learning curve, especially if you've never used recording software before, but it doesn't take very long to learn how to make good quality recordings using this application.

Lastly, if you want to not only record your music, but have your computer give you feedback on your performance, provide accompaniment for you that follows your expressive phrasing, and have access to a huge library of music online, you have to check out Smart Music. I used Smart Music extensively with my students this past year and had some great experiences with it. In addition to all of the features mentioned above, Smart Music can record your performance as an mp3 file, so you or your students can email the recording or put it on their mp3 player. I will be writing a more in-depth article on Smart Music in the near future.

Make Recording Part of Your Concert Preparations

I recently sang in an a cappella concert with Project Philly. The concert was recorded and also had a live webcast. A few days after the concert, I went back and watched the recording from the live webcast, and was reminded again why I needed to write this article. The performances that evening were definitely of a high quality. However, one of the aspects of performing that was lacking across the board was ensemble balance. Balance was addressed at times throughout the concert preparation period, but as the directors of a cappella groups are nearly always performers as well, there was no time except at dress rehearsal when the directors stepped out and listened from afar.

Recording a performing ensemble should be a part of any concert preparation period during the final phase of macro-rehearsal. After all the nitty-gritty rehearsing has happened and performers are "putting it all together" and doing runs of entire tunes, recording the ensemble can be very illuminating in terms of balance, blend, pitch, and rhythmic flaws. I highly recommend to everyone (myself included) that either recording or having a trusted colleague listen to the ensemble or soloist from a distance be a part of every concert preparation about 3/4 of the way to concert time.